Design and implementation of an interoperable messaging system for IoT healthcare services

The spry maturation of Internet of Things (IoT) has paved way to the rapid development of numerous sectors and these have been envisioned in; connected transport, smart cities, connected homes, connected healthcare, etc. IoT is a technology that connects "things" that are embedded with sensors, actuators and network connectivity to collect and exchange the data to the internet. The ability of IoT that offers distinct technologies for a small constrained device to collect and deliver messages across sophisticated networks leaves room for more exploration. Zeroing down to the healthcare sector, a couple of Personal Health Devices (PHDs) have been developed to collect and share information across the internet. One Machine to Machine (oneM2M), ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD are some of the healthcare standards that have been developed have been developed to deal with the issue of interoperability in the IoT. In this paper we design and implement an interoperable messaging system that is based on international standards for IoT healthcare services. Standard IoT protocols; Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) are some of the protocols that were designed to be used in an IoT environment. We designed and implemented a message system using CoAP following international standards for IoT healthcare services. This is due to better performance that CoAP offers in a constrained environment over other protocols. The paper further analyses and evaluates a comparative performance of number of packets transmitted in a transaction and packet loss rate number during transmission between the designed system and existing messaging system that uses MQTT.